SMRTR AIJul 20, 2026Hacker News

How Does an LLM Request and Response Cycle Work? A Full Walkthrough

SMRTR summary

When you send a message to an AI chatbot, far more happens than most people realize. Your text is broken into numeric tokens, passed through billions of neural network parameters, and the response is generated one token at a time — not all at once. Each token streams back instantly as it's produced, explaining the word-by-word typing effect. Two key speed metrics matter most: time to first token and how fast tokens keep arriving after that.

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